Cougars step up the pace

PULLMAN – It seemed like a routine drill. The offense pitted against the defense. The ball on the 15-yard line, going in.

But this year at Washington State there is nothing routine about any aspect of practice. Drills go by at warp speed. Players run from spot to spot. Then there are the team drills. There’s the offense, standing at the line of scrimmage, center Kenny Alfred over the ball, ready to go just seconds after the previous play ends.

Saturday, the offense attacked. A pass falls incomplete. The defense is ready to whoop … but wait. The offense is ready to go again. A quick run. The defense attacks. The ballcarrier is stymied. The defense is ready to … but wait. The offense is ready to go again.

Shift. Another one. A man in motion. Quarterback Gary Rogers takes the snap and attacks the left side. No one’s there. The defense is a step slow reacting. Touchdown.

The offense gets to whoop and holler.

“All day long,” receiver Michael Willis yells as the offense comes off the field. “Tempo baby, tempo.”

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Such is the case this year at Washington State. New head coach Paul Wulff brought offensive coordinator Todd Sturdy with him from Eastern Washington. Sturdy, just a year removed from being a NAIA head coach, brought his no-huddle, multiple-look offense with him.

And the speed of practice changed.

“Practice is definitely up-tempo,” Rogers says. “That’s the main thing. The tempo is so fast, everybody needs to stay focused and pay attention to what the coaches are saying.”

The Cougars go fast because the offense wants to play fast.

“We simulate, as much as we can, game day,” Wulff says. “We put them in game situations as often as we can.”

Wulff and Sturdy’s no-huddle offense scored 33.6 points per game – including 42.3 the final four games – last year in Cheney, helping the Eagles to the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision quarterfinals and a 9-4 record.

But it gave Eastern more than just a way to bamboozle a defense – though it did that. To play it right during games, it must be practiced at the same NASCAR-like speed. With less time standing around, a two-hour practice contains three hours worth of work.

“For me, as a coordinator, that’s one of the top things I love about it,” Sturdy says. “We can go like gangbusters and increase our repetitions – I’m a rep guy, always have been – to increase our efficiency.

“It’s about the learning curve, getting a kid from point A to point B, his growth as a player. If you throw more reps at him, it’s a simple deal.”

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No offense or defense is a panacea. Sturdy, who has been running the no-huddle, multiple-set offense since his days at St. Ambrose College, knows that.

“It still comes back to efficiency,” he says. “First-down efficiency, turnovers, getting big plays, red-zone efficiency. Efficiency. Putting points on the board. Those are the things I think are critical.

“Coming up with all these X’s and O’s and good game plans and attacking people, that’s one thing. But to me, the no-huddle just gives you more bullets. It gives you more opportunities to be efficient.”

It also takes away bullets from the defense’s holster.

“For me, it’s definitely nice because it gets the defense on their heels,” says Rogers, a senior running the no-huddle for the first time. “That’s the main thing, just trying to throw the defense off with our tempo. We declare what we’re going to do.”

“It keeps you from substituting, from getting into a nickel or dime package when you really need to,” says Chris Ball, the Cougars’ co-defensive coordinator and assistant head coach. “They control the tempo. Even though they are at the line, it doesn’t mean necessarily they are going to snap the ball. But they could, so you need to be ready to go.”

That’s what Sturdy wants the offense to do: Take away control of the tempo from the defense, with all its down-and-distance charts and exotic packages.

“We would like to play at a fast pace, but we would like to be able to change our pace,” Sturdy says. “I think that’s the important thing, having the ability to change our tempo. That’s the key.”

Well, one of them, anyway.

“It’s great to go fast, but you need to get first downs,” he says, laughing. “That doesn’t change. If you can be efficient, if you can get to third down and medium and short, strive to have opportunities to continue to move the chains, at a fast pace you have an opportunity to wear down some of those d-tackles.

“If you can do that in the first half, and now you have some d-tackles that are standing and breathing real hard, then, I think, you have some opportunities to take advantage of some things.”

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Ball’s defense – he shares coordinator duties with Jody Sears, who came over from EWU with Wulff and Sturdy – is on the other side of that equation every day in practice.

If the offense is going fast, if the practice tempo is following suit, then the defense has to keep up. At first Ball, who has coached at nine different colleges, including Pittsburgh, Alabama and twice at WSU, worried that speed would kill the defense’s ability to improve.

“When (we) first did it, that’s exactly what I said,” Ball says. “I said ‘The little things are getting missed.’ We would have to let (the little things) go and have to hit them in the film room. (Now) we’ll stop it, coach it and get it fixed right away and move on.

“It has its advantages and it has its disadvantages, especially when you’re putting something new in, or you’re working on something new and you have to defend all those different formations. But, in the long run, it helps you, helps you get lined up against just about anybody.”

Now Ball is a believer.

“No question,” he answered when asked if the practice tempo is helping the defense get into better physical shape and improve faster. “And that’s one of the big advantages (of practicing this way). We’re getting a lot more reps, which means we get a lot more work over the course of a week.”

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A week into fall practice and the offensive players are already seeing the benefits of the Sturdy plan.

“It’s a lot faster,” says junior running back Dwight Tardy, last year’s leading rusher. “The tempo is a lot faster. We’re running a lot, so we’re in good shape as an offense.

“To throw off the defense, we’re trying to get it tired. We’re definitely going to try to wear out the defense by playing at a fast tempo.”

The Cougar defense is also seeing the advantages.

“The tempo is a lot different, a lot faster,” senior middle linebacker Greg Trent says. “Our offense running a no-huddle is like always playing against a two-minute drill. I like that. When we see it in a game, we’ll be ready for it.”

But it isn’t just working against the no-huddle part of Sturdy’s no-huddle, multiple-set offense that helps the defense. The multiple-set part is important, too.

“You get so many different looks,” Ball says. “It’s tough at first, but in the long run it helps you because of getting more reps and we’re having to line up against a lot of different formations.

“The shifting and motion is another wrinkle with the no-huddle. It really narrows your package down. They can get you in some situations and snap that ball and you might not be lined up right.”

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The first test at the top level of college football is still about three weeks away, when Washington State travels across the state to open the Wulff era in Seattle against the Big 12’s Oklahoma State.

If Saturday’s end-of-practice live scrimmage is any indication, the Cougar offense still has a long way to go to reach Sturdy’s efficiency goal. In two possessions against the starting defense, the No. 1 offense turned the ball over twice.

“Consistency,” Wulff says when asked what needs to be improved the most. “Executing their assignment No. 1, on both sides of the ball. Executing the technique we’re working on and then just being consistent with our performance on every play.

“We just have to continue to keep working through and keep repping to improve that stuff.”

There are a couple of givens, however, no matter if it’s the first week of practice or the last game of the year: The tempo is going to be quick and the offense will set it.

“They have to react to us, we’re not reacting to them,” Sturdy says. “We’re going to do what we do.”